Network services are widely deployed and useful in many networks. The services provide a range of functions such as security, wide area network (WAN) acceleration, firewall, Network Address Translation (NAT), deep packet inspection (DPI), intrusion detection service (IDS), server load balancing, etc. Services may be physically located at different points in the network infrastructure, such as the WAN, data center, campus, and so forth.
In certain circumstances, services may be applied as part of a “service chain.” A service chain is a data structure defining a set of service nodes hosting various services and the order in which the services should be applied to the data/payload (e.g., video data, numeric data, alphanumeric data, voice data, etc.) of selective traffic (packets/frames).